What inspires you to work in digital humanities and how did you get started?
As a transborder scholar studying gender identities and violence at the U.S.-Mexico border through literature and archival research, I have found in the digital humanities a powerful tool for visualizing and creating digital knowledge that reflects the movement and fluidity inherent in border regions from past times to the present. This approach allows me to broaden my research, recover marginalized data, and compile and preserve narratives that have often been misrepresented or overlooked. By doing so, I can offer a more nuanced understanding of the border, women, and their communities, and highlight transgressive perspectives that challenge conventional views.
I was also inspired to work in the digital humanities because it fosters collaboration with experts both within and outside of academia. What I love about digital humanities is that it doesn’t demand perfection; instead, it encourages continuous learning and experimentation. This process allows me to bridge theory and practice in meaningful ways, resulting in transformative work that not only impacts scholarship but also has a direct, tangible effect on community members and scholars alike.
You edited Borderlands Digital Humanities special issue for Reviews in Digital Humanities. How do you define “Borderlands Digital Humanities?“
I have been engaged in Borderlands Digital Humanities (BDH) through various completed and ongoing projects. Recently, however, I have been working on a more formal definition of this sub-field within the broader Digital Humanities landscape. To address this, I’d like to share a quote from an article I co-authored with my colleagues Laura Gonzales, Maira Alvarez, and Carolina Alonso, in which we begin to define TransBorderlands Digital Humanities. Our definition is based on the United Fronteras project, a transborder digital repository that documents the past and present U.S.-Mexico digital projects and materials. This article will be published in Spring 2025 in a Special Issue of DH Quarterly.
Borders are often seen as imaginary, geographic, and man-made divisions that separate lands, peoples, and cultures. Borderlands, by contrast, are the regions surrounding these enforced boundaries—where, as Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) suggests, “a third country—a border culture”—emerges. We argue that borderlands and border cultures are shared spaces, historically shaped by communities since pre-colonial times, and should not be viewed as divided or peripheral regions but as dynamic, interconnected territories.
TransBorderlands Digital Humanities (TBDH) is an approach to DH that embraces fluidity, collaboration, and identity. TBDH is not only a theory and a praxis, but also a pedagogy and a space for community engagement. It invites us to reimagine DH beyond traditional boundaries, recognizing borderland spaces as rich sites for linguistic and cultural study. Transborder DH, at its core, is a commitment to knowledge production that values the fluid, interconnected identities, cultures, and languages of the borderlands as central to DH work. TBDH focuses on the creation of responsible and ethical shared data across borders, connecting archives from diverse regions to foster both quantitative and qualitative research that challenges the notion of divided regions. This approach involves creating metadata, categorizing, and contextualizing border communities’ histories, cultures, and societies in ways that contest colonial and imperial narratives. Through the development of digital resources—such as archives, maps, data networks, 3D artifacts, and other visualizations—TBDH highlights local, personal, and transborder stories of social justice.
You have written extensively about using digital humanities technologies and methods to make information more accessible. I find particularly exciting the argument that digital humanities projects “can intervene in the colonial and capitalist digital cultural record.” What are some of the issues with access to archives that you have seen? Why is it important for scholars to participate in this intervention?
I have written about the power of creating transborder knowledge through digital humanities approaches, such as the development of new digital archives and maps. In one article I co-authored, we explored how to intervene in the colonial and capitalist digital cultural record by creating a transborder archive of newspapers published along the U.S.-Mexico border from colonial times to 1920. Titled “Transborder Knowledge-Making: Accessing, Reclaiming, and Creating Digital Archives,” I discuss:
The 3145 km geopolitical border region between Mexico and the United States, is not only characterized by common natural ecosystems, it also shares geopolitical, social, economic, and cultural dynamics between the two nations. This imposed division was established in 1848 at the end of the U.S.-Mexico War, although local communities had already been in contact prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As a result, it is important to understand this border region as more fluid than static. This is particularly evident in the region’s print culture. For instance, newspapers printed along the Mexico-U.S. border have been written in multiple languages, such as French, Spanish, English, and several Indigenous languages, showing the various transitions the territory has endured over time. The distribution and content of borderlands newspapers indicate a mobility deeply embedded in print culture that contains a variety of data documenting migration flows, and transborder identities and dynamics; however, the traditional cataloging process emphasizes division rather than holism by classifying sources and archives based on their location on either side of the border. Noble (2018) notes that the invention of print culture accelerated the need for information classification schemes. In the case of borderlands newspapers, to access or reclaim them as transborder newspapers is challenging due to national classification schemes that perpetuate colonial practices and impose imperial perspectives on the material. Thus, it is important to decolonize existing frameworks and create new schemes that enable the material to be approached as part of a shared borderlands’ cultural heritage.
Nowadays, to access or reclaim border newspapers is arduous work because collections are housed in various private and public institutions that operate under different regulations. For border community members to access or reclaim this cultural heritage, governments and institutions have created infrastructures that limit their accessibility by establishing a limited discovery context, paywall systems, memberships, in-person visits only, or other restrictions on use. Ultimately, the inequalities of ownership in print culture continues to maintain gatekeeping control over access and production of knowledge establishing an intellectual environment in which transborder cultural heritage is violently denied. An institution in the United States that houses newspapers originating on the Mexican side of the border presents a complicated scenario for border communities trying to access and reclaim these newspapers as border cultural heritage that can be integrated into digital platforms for new knowledge production. Kimberly Christen (2018) reiterates how access and openness are ‘‘almost always more complicated, more nuanced, and conditional. If [we] look at how people share, access, and circulate information, then we see a range of ways to do so, and only very few are oppressive or opportunistic.’’ In the case of the periodical collections available online it is particularly important to expand beyond the basic model of metadata and curation whose ‘‘foundation in practices of discovery or collection implies unfettered access as the norm and description and sharing [with limited] cultural, historical, or political context’’ (Christen 2018). That is to say, these collections are not digitally accessible, nor do they currently exist in an open-source platform, restricting the availability of border cultural heritage and its use for the creation of digital knowledge. Scholars can challenge colonial and imperial violence by revising the structures of knowledge originating from border regions. They have the opportunity to reconstruct, build new, and create alternative projects that reframe and remediate both analog and cultural records.
Boderlands Archive Cartography (BAC) is a map of newspapers from across the U.S.-Mexico border. Why did you undertake this project? Why use maps for this project?
This is a great question and I will add the following questions I address in an article about mapping through SIGuachea methodology that came up before imaging and then creating BAC’s map: What does it mean to map the US-Mexico border, given the national discourse of this region as a dangerous divided space without culture? Why is it important to create a digital cartographic visualization that contextualizes the history of both sides of the US-Mexico border before and after 1848, when the current division line was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? How can community knowledge and memory of newspaper publishing in the borderlands be documented and preserved?
The creation of BAC’s interactive map occurred in several stages: first, identifying the newspapers published in the US-Mexico border region that are held in various US and Mexican repositories and are accessible in physical, microfilm, or digital formats. These newspapers had been categorized according to established methods that divided and erased the transborder knowledge of the region. This data—the names of the newspapers and where they were located—was compiled into a dataset that reflects the different geopolitical transitions experienced within the border region. Finally, the dataset was incorporated into CARTO, a platform that offers GIS (geographic information system) tools, to begin the creation of the digital interactive map.
In most maps, the US-Mexico border region is represented as divided. Archivists have followed this same colonial and imperial structure by using the 1848 boundary as a dividing line when primary sources are cataloged, rather than considering historical and present-day circumstances to contextualize the materials. Through BAC it was possible to interrogate this archival practice by observing how newspapers that were published in the border region from 1808 to the 1930s were cataloged as either Mexican or US, or as Latino or Mexican American, or according to major historical events such as the Mexican Revolution, rather than from a transborder context.
The first part was not contemplating a map, it involved building a database that features transnational data, one that views these newspapers as transborder rather than as tied exclusively to one country or the other. After the development of the database, the next step was to foreground the stories that are documented in the newspapers. These narratives describe the geopolitical transitions that the US-Mexico border region faced from 1808 to the 1930s.
When we decided to develop an interactive digital map to visualize the digital transborder archive, it was important for us to recognize that interactive maps are not just instruments of knowledge but are also powerful tools of storytelling. We were acutely aware of this power and of the need for a critical counter-cartography of the US-Mexico borderlands. The database was seamlessly integrated into CARTO, a GIS and web mapping platform. BAC’s map was created to challenge dominant narratives by presenting alternative ways of understanding and representing the US-Mexico borderlands. We employed “geographies from below”—a generative process that applies a view from below to reveal interventions and highlight particular ways of life. The map emerged organically since there were very few examples that not only had a transborder context but also supported storytelling.
Significantly, BAC’s interactive map serves to support a number of storytelling approaches. First, it offers insight into the geopolitical spatial dynamics of publishing in the US-Mexico transborder region from 1808 to the 1930s. Second, it offers information about the interactions of border communities, showcasing their cross-border fluidity throughout the three periods represented. Third, the map exemplifies a SIGuache approach to borderland storytelling, effectively challenging the conventional perception of the border as fixed, divisive, uniform, and barren. By incorporating physical addresses and supplementary metadata, BAC endeavors to document and preserve the historical spatial legacy of newspaper production in the US-Mexico borderlands. BAC counters the erasure of significant spatial connections by illuminating the intricate network of historical and cultural intersections that have shaped the transborder region. The use of digital maps and geo-analysis tools allowed us to visualize transnational data and emancipate divided and static repositories. BAC’s map offers interaction with transborder archival material by enabling access to individual issues through links to their respective archives.
Much of your work is produced collaboratively with scholars from many diverse places. What role does collaboration play in digital humanities?
Yes, absolutely, and there is still much work to be done to cultivate a culture of respect, commitment, and recognition. Collaboration in the digital humanities is crucial because it brings together people from diverse fields, allowing for the delegation of responsibilities, the learning of new roles, and the sharing of knowledge. It pushes us beyond our comfort zones and fosters collective decision-making. Above all, it builds a community of solidarity, one that creates lasting projects and memories. However, it’s important to note that within digital humanities collaboration, there is still a lingering hierarchy of knowledge, which needs to be addressed—particularly with older generations and the traditional forms of research in the humanities.
Are there any exciting ways to incorporate digital humanities projects in the classroom?
Absolutely! Digital humanities projects can be integrated into the classroom as a way to engage students in the critical analysis of this work at the intersection of course topics—such as Borderlands Journalism—and exploring projects like Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC). As well as allowing students to not only analyze existing projects but also learn how to create both micro and macro projects, whether individually or as part of a team.
Recently, I taught two courses:
- Data and Activism Against Gender Violence and Feminicides – In this course, students analyzed a range of compelling projects on gender violence and feminicides. They also worked with various texts and digital sources to compile data and create datasets and databases for future digital projects. You can view the syllabus and final projects here: Gender Violence Projects.
- Latinx Migration Through Archives and Literature – In this course, students explored exciting projects related to Latinx migration, using both primary and secondary sources, as well as fieldwork, to create and integrate new materials into digital tools. The students then developed visualization modules to tell digital stories of Latinx migration to San Antonio across time. You can view the syllabus and final project here: San Antonio LatinxMigration Projects.